Darwin machine

A '''Darwin machine''' (a 1987 coinage by William H. Calvin, by analogy to a Turing machine) is a machine that, like a Turing machine, involves an iteration process that yields a high-quality result, but, whereas a Turing machine uses logic, the Darwin machine uses rounds of variation, selection, and inheritance. In its original connotation, a Darwin machine is any process that bootstraps quality by using all of the six essential features of a Darwinian process: A ''pattern'' is ''copied'' with ''variations'', where populations of one variant pattern ''compete'' with another population, their relative success biased by a ''multifaceted environment'' (natural selection) so that winners predominate in producing the further variants of the next generation (Darwin's ''inheritance principle'').

More loosely, a Darwin machine is a process that uses some subset of the Darwinian essentials, typically natural selection to create a non-reproducing pattern, as in neural Darwinism. Many aspects of neural development use overgrowth followed by pruning to a pattern, but the resulting pattern does not itself create further copies.

''Darwin machine'' has been used multiple times to name computer programs after Charles Darwin.

==References and external links==

* William H. Calvin (1987), [http://www.williamcalvin.com/1980s/1987Nature.htm "The brain as a Darwin Machine"], ''Nature'' 330:33-34. * William H. Calvin (1997) [http://www.williamcalvin.com/1990s/1997JMemetics.htm "The Six Essentials?] Minimal Requirements for the Darwinian Bootstrapping of Quality," ''Journal of Memetics'' 1:1. * George B. Dyson (1998), ''Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence'' (Perseus 1997) (1998) {{ISBN|0-7382-0030-1}}. * J. M. Manier (1996), ''Reason and Instinct (Robert Wright's The Moral Animal and Henry Plotkin's Darwin, Machines and the Nature of Knowledge)''. THEORY AND PSYCHOLOGY. 6 (2): 347–348. ISSN 0959-3543 * Henry Plotkin (1994), ''Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge'' (Harvard University Press. {{ISBN|0-674-19280-X}} * Henry Plotkin & Nicholas S. Thompson (1995), ''Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge''. ''Contemporary Psychology''. 40 (12), 1179. * E. A. Smith (1995), ''Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge (Henry C. Plotkin)''. ''Politics and the Life Sciences : the Journal of the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences''. 14 (2), 296. ISSN 0730-9384

Category:History of artificial intelligence Category:Cybernetics Category:Emergence Category:Evolution